Corble Collection To Be Digitized!

This is ridiculously exciting news! Big thank you to Gunðormr Dengir for pointing me at this!

(This is going to be an exclamation point heavy post. Deal with it.)

A portion of the headline reads, "KBR, KU Leuven Libraries and Google signed agreements to share a large portion of important digitised documents reflecting the rich cultural and historical heritage located in the libraries."

The article notes that more than 80,000 individual works are going to be made freely available, which is itself absolutely bonkers exciting. However, of special interest to me is the last bullet point example of what's going to be put up on Google books: "Corble collection: collection of the British fencer Archibald Corble (1883-1944), one of the world's most extensive collections on the history of fencing."

The Corble collection is probably one of the most extensive fencing-related collections you may never have heard of. A description of it is here, but let me just quote from it: "The collection consists of about 1,900 copies, dating from the 15th to the 20th century, and mainly originates in France, England, Latin America, Italy and Germany." Additionally, it notes that "This valuable collection is attractive to many scholars because of its diversity. The scope of the Corble Collection is much broader than only the art of fencing. It also contains treatises on duelling written by various fencing masters; works on self-defence; and books on the handling, making, and evolution of stabbing weapons and firearms. But the collection also contains material that focuses on the legal and religious side of duelling, such as pamphlets on lawsuits and legislation, as well as religious pamphlets that warn audiences against the dangers of duelling."

I am so excited for this! There's what looks to be a partial list of the collection here. That's just from a quick digging around - if I find a better or more useful list, I'll edit this post to include it. There are definitely works in there that are readily available in translation (Marozzo's Opera Nova, for instance) but I can't wait to see what manuals or treatises we haven't had ready access to before this get to be seen by anyone on the internet.

This is so awesome and I cannot wait.

More Guild Ranks and Drama and Things Like That!

Well, pandemic brain, mental health, surgery, and the holidays all conspired to make this take a lot longer then I wanted to get this done. (Remember when I said a day or two? Ha ha, I'm so optimistic before the crushing reality sets in.) But here we finally are, and that's just how it is, and we're doing the research and writing as we can, as best we can.

When we left off, we'd walked through the promotions up from scholar to free scholar. Next up would be Provost, and then finally Master. (To remind folks, there were the four ancient Masters who were in charge of the whole guild. They must have changed over time, but we have no record of this specifically, let alone how the promotions were decided.) 

The prize for Provost is where some of the really entertaining stuff starts to appear. When a free scholar decided to play for Provost, both he and his Master went to the four ancient Masters to discuss it. (The manuscript specifically notes that if the student's master were dead, they could choose one of the four ancient masters to fight under, so that's nice.) The four ancient Masters set the day of the prize, where the free scholar was supposed to fight at the longsword, backsword, and staff (though in reality these were somewhat flexible). At this point, the free scholar had to, at his own expense, give four weeks notice to all Provosts of the guild who lived within 60 miles of the location where the prize was to be fought that it was happening. For any Provost inside that radius who was not informed, the free scholar had to pay the ancient Masters a penalty of five shillings. According to the currency converter from my previous post, that comes out to $44.40 in today's dollars. Additionally, any Provost who lived more than 20 miles from the prize fight would have half of their travel expenses paid by the free scholar. (As an aside, Lilias pointed out to me the possibility of doing some fun math here as a free scholar - is it more expensive to pay half of someone's travel expenses or to pay the penalty for not inviting them?) Finally, assuming they pass their prize fight, to receive their Provost's Letter they must pay "to the four ancient Masters for the sealing thereof after the rate which is set amongst them with all manner of other duties belonging to them."

It all keeps coming back to those promotion fees and belt tests, right?

Once the free scholar fights his prize and becomes a Provost of the guild, some new rights and responsibilities are theirs. First, they may not keep a school within seven miles of any Master's school unless they receive permission from the four ancient Masters. They may not teach any scholar unless that scholar is sworn to the Provost's own Master; if done, the Provost must then pay the Master a fee of two pence for each scholar and another two pence to the "most ancient Master of the four" as well as showing his account books every quarter. If they happen to live within the 60 mile radius of a Provost's prize and they know about it, they must appear and fight (unless they are ill or "busied in the Queen's affairs") or pay a penalty of six shillings eightpence to the four ancient Masters. Finally, they are not supposed to play their Master's prize for another seven years - which again, seemed in practice to be a guideline more than a rule.

Now, the prize fight for Master. The Provost who wishes to become a Master does this through the Master under which he fought his prize for Provost (or again, under one of the four ancient Masters if necessary). Assuming they all approve, the four ancient Masters choose the day for the prize, and the Provost will have to fight at the two handed sword, the "Basterd sword", the pike, backsword, and (finally!) the rapier and dagger. The Provost was required to inform all Masters that lived within 40 miles eight weeks in advance of the day. Unlike the Provost, there's no mention of penalties for either the Provost for not informing anyone nor to the Master who doesn't attend. 

Assuming the student does well, he pays for his Master's letter and the sealing of it and all the duties that he might owe (which again, are unspecified), he's given his Master's oath and boom! A new Master! At this point, according to the Master's oath, the newly promoted fencer should not set forth any prize (which I take to mean bring up a student for a prize fight, but I could be wrong) or keep more than one school in London. Other items of the oath include stating that they also shouldn't poach students from another Master, set up a prize fight for a hopeful free scholar or Provost without going through the proper channels, and so on in that vein. 

Interestingly, there are a small number of instances where there did not seem to be a prize fight at all. Four times in the Sloane manuscript we see, instead of the usual prize fight information, "Master's agreement" which seems to indicate a handwaved promotion to Master. This also happened six times with a promotion to Provost, three times for free scholar, and in one Provost's prize it let the candidate skip the back sword fights, though not long sword. Naturally, there aren't any notes describing why this happened, only that it did.

Aylward has some notes as to how the prize fights themselves were conducted, which are pretty interesting. He notes that in each weapon, the prizor would be fighting two bouts with each person answering the prize - so if there were four weapons and six answerers that would mean the prizor would be fighting forty-eight bouts in that day. Naturally, many of those bouts would be one right after the other as well, although Aylward describes how the Masters running the show would call "this weapon is now done" with a fanfare of drums and would then confer with themselves upon it, giving the prizor a chance to sit and rest. They would then call "The first bout at such-and-such weapon" to more drums, and the bouts would continue.

There were definitely rules of engagement in the fights, too. Per Aylward, in 1599 George Silver (we had to bring him up eventually!) bemoaned that "there are now in these days no grips, wrestling, closes, striking with the hilts, daggers, or bucklers used in our fence-schools." I can almost hear him shaking his fists at the sky while screaming, "Back in my day!"

Interesting fact about Silver, though? He was not remotely associated with the London Masters of Defense. They were a trade guild, and Silver was a gentleman - certainly not someone who would join a common corporation! That said, he did write that he had nothing bad to say about the Masters, and he accounted them quite skilled.

I know, I said I'd yell more about Silver. I'll yell about him in another post, because we need to wrap this up sometime. But I did promise some drama, so here we are:

The Company of the Masters of the Science of Defense was not, as far as we can tell, actually an officially chartered guild. I mentioned this in a previous post. Henry VIII signed letters patent in 1540 to charter the guild. Henry died in 1547, and papers like the one he signed typically lapse upon the monarch's death and as Aylward puts it, "it depended largely upon the capacity of the grantees to satisfy the claims of officials paid only by their fees as to whether a revival was obtained from his successor." We had been wondering how the guild funded itself, and it seemed pretty slim - and this may well be proof of that. The Masters sure kept acting like they had a patent and they said they had one, but there's no record of it existing during Edward VI's, Mary's, or Elizabeth's reigns. In fact, they had been ordered to produce it in 1545 so they could set up schools in London, and the paperwork did not appear in court.

No, I don't know how they were able to open up schools anyway.

The Sloane manuscript purports that Elizabeth renewed the patent and added to it the right "to play openly within the City of London." (Which is just really stylish.) But no, there's no record of this existing anywhere else. They did fight a number of prizes before royalty, so they seemed to have some favor there, but not enough to get the paperwork from them.

With that, I'm going to wrap it here because otherwise I'll never post it. Next time, maybe Fabris. Or yelling about Silver and his shenanigans. Maybe Marozzo for variety. Who can say what'll happen around here?

Guild Ranks! Money! Politics! All that kind of drama! Part One of a Dramatic Series!

In my latest entry for my Let's Yell About the London Masters of Defense posts, we're going to look at the various ranks in the guild, what they would be allowed or forbidden, the money that was involved, and all that stuff that's both pretty practical and also could contribute to a ridiculous amount of drama.

There will, naturally, be some yelling about George Silver. Because if we're yelling about money and drama involving the London Masters, I can absolutely work in some complaining about Silver at the same time. It's basically mandatory.

To recap, there were four normally achievable ranks in the guild: Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were the Four Ancient Masters who were in charge of the whole thing, but we don't have any records of how the people in those positions changed or were replaced.)

Becoming a Scholar was something that basically anyone could do. When you decided to go to a master (or a provost who had been permitted to teach), the presumptive scholar would be given the oath by their new master (or possibly an usher or Provost so delegated) and pay the master 12 pence for the oath and 4 pence for entrance to the guild. Additionally, whatever fee the scholar and master agree on would be paid half up front, and the remainder as they agree to it; the examples of these fees are 30 and 40 shillings, which I imagine is a ballpark number for what the costs would have been. Despite there being no specific fee, masters are forbidden from undercutting one another. The scholar also had to bring their own weapons and supplies, or else "agree with his master or his master's deputy" for them.

(As an aside, I went to this currency converter and checked how much 40 shillings (or two pounds, per this site) would be in 2021 dollars, and it says about $710. I haven't done any real digging into how accurate that truly is, but it's amusing nonetheless!)

What's missing is how often a scholar is typically going to pay this fee to their master. The 16 pence in up-front fees are pretty clearly one-time costs, but the payment for lessons seems like something that would be recurring. There's nothing in the Sloane manuscript hinting at whether these are yearly or something else.

Incidentally, we don't have anything like an exact wording for the oath a scholar had to take. We know that it was on the cross of a sword, and that he wasn't allowed to use the teachings against his master or to teach them until he was permitted, but that's about it. No specific wording is recorded for that oath.

So! Moving upward, like I described in my previous post, the scholar could say that he wanted to fight for free scholar, get tested, get permitted to do so, and get the prize fight scheduled. There was one hitch which didn't come up in my last post because it was a background point to the prize fight itself, but it's germane to what I'm writing about here:

The London Mayor and Aldermen. 

As previously described, a prize fight was kind of a big deal - nearly a local holiday in terms of impact on the city around it. The fighter would process through the city with drummers and a retinue all the way to the location of the fight. People would want to skip out on work to go watch, and it seems about as disruptive to an area as a big game day is to the area around Fenway Park. In the "Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia,"(a catalog of London legal correspondence and records) we can see mention of letters from Ambrose, Earl of Warwick to the Aldermen asking for a license for his servant to play his prizes. The aldermen would routinely pull out "but the plague" as a ready excuse, and it really seemed as though getting permission from them could be a real pain. While they could prohibit the procession through the City of London pretty readily, there were a couple workarounds for holding the prize fights themselves: either go outside the city, or take advantage of one of the liberties therein - specifically Blackfriar's.

Going outside the city was straightforward enough, and there are records of a number of prize fights taking place almost literally in the shadow of the city walls. What seemed to happen more regularly however, was making use of the liberties of London - areas which were outside the control of the civic authorities. These liberties contained theaters such as the Curtain and the Theater, and inn-yards at the Bell Savage and the Bull. Blackfriars as well was located within a liberty, and has evidence of potentially being a headquarters of sorts of the London Masters, including rooms owned by William Joyner, one of the four Ancient Masters of the guild.

Back to the prize fight itself! These were events which were potentially extremely lucrative for the individuals fighting their prize, as well as the guild itself. There's no particular proof that theaters or inns would charge for admission; there seemed to be a strong ideal that prizes should be public. That said, it's very likely that they would have done a brisk trade in drinks. However, the real  money made for the guild would be from the audience throwing it at the stage if they were particularly pleased with the fights that they saw - certainly a real motivation for the fencers involved! The take from the stage seems as though it would have been divided up among the prize fighter(s), the guild, and based on a remark from the diary of Philip Henslowe, who owned a number of theaters, the venue itself. Henslowe notes that he was owed 40 shillings, which as noted above could be a really decent chunk of money for just supplying the space. If that's the cut that the guild was willing to hand over to the venue, I'm very sure that what they wanted to keep for themselves and for the prize fighters would be comparable at the least.

So! Assuming the scholar was judged sufficiently skilled, he would have to pay "all orders and duetyes" as appropriate to a free scholar. The Sloane manuscript doesn't indicate what those would be, though. There aren't any indications of further privileges that a free scholar gets, only that they need to wait for seven years before they're allowed to test for Provost.

This is getting a little long, so I'm going to cut it off here, and wrangle the remaining draft into a part two within a day or so, rather than sitting on this for even longer. (Pandemic brain is a thing. Who knew? Focusing on things is hard now.)

Let's Yell About Prize Fights

So wow, you get one injury and a lot of your focus for even writing about fencing and fencing-related topics is just completely shot. Whoops. But hey, we're back now and as promised I'm going to have another couple of fun times posts and yell about the London Masters of Defense prize fights, how they worked, fun things around them, and all of that. I've talked a little bit about them before (in this four-part series: one, two, three, and four) but I really wanted to focus in on the guild in general and the prize fights in particular here, rather than as an adjunct topic to the sizes of raised stages. Also, honestly, they're a fun thing to read about and also for me to write about here, and I wanted to spend some time just going on about a fun topic today. I'm going to focus solely on the prize fights in this entry; I think in a subsequent post I'll yell about the guild as a guild, talk about how it worked, poke more at their structure, and talk about the money.

Sources for people to hunt down and read! I'm pulling from a few books and articles here. The first is "The Noble Science" by Herbert Berry. This is a transcription and study of the Sloane Ms. 2530, which are some papers pertaining to the Masters of Defense, covering about 1540 to 1590. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend this. It's a fantastic resource. Next is "The English Master of Arms" by J.D. Aylward. The sections which cover the time period of interest are just wonderful. Finally, "Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay" by Craig Turner and Tony Soper. This is less about the time period in general and focuses more on presenting the manuals of di Grassi, Saviolo, and Silver for stage combat purposes, but it still has some good stuff in here.

For easily found online articles and resources we have "Public Fencing Contests on the Elizabethan Stage" and "The Schools of Defense in Elizabethan London" both of which are available on JSTOR. (Herbert Berry also has a handful of articles there, focusing primarily on playhouses. Not directly relevant here, but really good reads!)

Getting to it, then!

In this context, prize fights were fought because they were a requirement of advancement in the London Masters of Defense. There were four ranks in the guild - Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were four Ancient Masters who were the heads of the guild, but we don't have any record about if or how they were replaced over time.) When someone decided that they wanted to go learn the noble science and became a student, they were administered an oath and admitted to the guild as a Scholar. (There was some entertaining financial rigmarole around this, which I'll get into in another post.) At this point, they'd study under that master for an indeterminate period of time; there's no specific time laid out that a scholar was required to study before they could challenge to become free scholars. 

When a scholar felt as though they were ready to become a free scholar, they would first go to their master and ask permission to hold a prize fight. Their master was supposed to contact the four ancient masters of the guild and let them know of the scholar's intent. At that point, the ancient masters would set up a private test within a school where the scholar would be required to defeat six other scholars, specifically with the back sword and longsword. This private test is not a requirement we see for the later prize fights but let's be honest, we can all think of newer fencers who would absolutely have tried to rush ahead with a public display before they were ready. Assuming the scholar passed that test to the satisfaction of the ancient masters the scholar would be told what days he would play his prize. The first day would involve the longsword against whatever scholars wished to fight, and the second day would have whichever other weapons the ancient masters decided upon. Sword and buckler were the most common, but staff and backsword also showed up in the records we have. Afterwards the ancient masters would confer and decide whether or not to promote the scholar.

Assuming the scholar was promoted to free scholar, they would pay whatever dues were owed to the guild and not be permitted to fight their prize for provost within seven years. Despite this restriction, the Sloane manuscript notes a number of folks who fought their provost's prize well before the seven years were up, though I don't know of any source explaining how those came to pass. I'm assuming that money talks, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Things would get more interesting when the free scholar sought to play for provost. Just like the last go-round, the free scholar would ask his master's permission to fight the prize and the four ancient masters would set the day and location. At that point, it was up to the free scholar to notify all provosts who lived within 60 miles of the prize fight's location, and they would owe a fine to the guild for each provost not notified. While provosts who lived within 20 miles of the prize fight traveled on their own dime, any provost farther away would have half their travel costs paid by the free scholar. In the section describing how the Provost's prize was to be played, the Sloane manuscript states that the free scholar would play at the two handed sword, back sword, and staff but the summaries of a number of prize fights list a number of different weapons used. Sometimes fewer than those three were used and sometimes more; I presume it was up to the ancient master who was overseeing that particular prize being fought. As before, the ancient masters discussed the prize fights and decided whether or not to promote the free scholar.

Again, assuming the free scholar was promoted to provost, they were not to be allowed to fight their master's prize for seven more years. Also, again, there are a number of people who fought their provost's prize well before the required seven years between free scholar and provost. Maybe the idea of seven years between ranks was more a guideline than a hard and fast rule?

Moving up to master was much the same as moving to provost. He would approach the four ancient masters, and they would set the day. The provost would then give warning at least eight weeks in advance to all masters who lived within 40 miles of the prize fight's location. The page listing the order for the master's prize says that the weapons would be the two handed sword, bastard sword, back sword, and the rapier and dagger. As with the provost's prize, in actuality there were some variations in the weapons used. While there was no further rank to challenge for, the restriction at this point was that the new master could not open up a school of their own for a year and a day after they were promoted.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, at each of the ranks of free scholar, provost, and master, there are recorded instances of the prize fight not being fought at all, but the rank being awarded by an agreement of the four ancient masters. There aren't any details about the reasons for these, so it is up to us to speculate as to why this was the case.

Finally, the Sloane manuscript lists a number of challenges which were fought before the Crown. These weren't prize fights, but presumably displays of skill which the Crown had to attend as part of the job; I don't think this was a specific indication of royal favor beyond "this is one of the guilds in London and the Crown is attending this function" or something similar, mostly because the London Masters weren't nobility or the like, but were middle-class tradesmen.

That's the quick and dirty discussion of the prize fights themselves. In the next couple posts, I want to look at some other issues in and around the guild - the duties and restrictions on the various ranks, as well as some of the problems they had in getting the prize fights set up. I also want to touch on what I've been able to figure out of some of the economics that were in play.

Wrapping the London Masters of Defense Rabbit Hole

 Okay, let's wrap up this random dive. (For now, anyway.)

While I started in on this by mulling over list sizes and hitting the boundary and deciding to poke at prize fights on the scaffold, the size of the scaffold, and so on, I definitely went a bit into the whole prize fight thing, inn-yards and playhouses, and more general bits about how the London Masters of Defense worked. My prior three entries covered a lot of that, but I want to take this last entry and go through some general interesting things about the London Masters of Defense, how they worked, and some side notes which I found really interesting.

So the beginning of the London Masters of Defense can be traced to Letters Patent from 1540 signed by Henry VIII, the text of which I dropped in an old post here. There are a couple really interesting things to note about this. First is that there's nothing about teaching or organizing or structure or anything else here. It's literally just "hey these twenty people (masters and provosts of the science of defense, according to the text) can go out and look for people who are supposedly teaching this stuff but are doing so really poorly and making actual masters look bad and are overcharging to boot and can drag them to a judge who will make them stop." That's really it. Secondly, and related to that first point is that although the patent implicitly gives the named individuals if not a monopoly on teaching fencing, at least massive control over it, but it doesn't actually incorporate them. They're not actually a guild in the way that, for instance, all the Livery Companies in London were. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to nail down any actual texts for a guild's Charter of Incorporation. I found one for the city of Wells, and while that's not quite the same, it does demonstrate the concept of the "rights and privileges" which the governing positions would be granted - which the Masters lack. (Though I did find a list of all the charters granted, which is kind of neat.) In "The English Master of Arms," Aylward says about it that, "If we compare it with, for instance, a Patent incorporating the Salters, issued by Elizabeth nineteen years later, we find that the Salters are given powers to elect Wardens, to make ordinances, and to enjoy all former liberties, none of which are given by the Patent of 1540 to Ric. Beste and his associates." That said, there was never any claim specifically made about them being a formal company, corporation, or guild - they only ever referred to themselves as the Masters of Defense.

What this all means is that there was one major impact of not being a formally chartered company - the Masters of Defense were not considered exempt from the various laws regarding vagrancy. Specifically, the Vagabond Act of 1572 (which I did a lot of digging for but the internet doesn't seem to have the full text of the act) mentions fencers specifically. In short, being a Master of Defense did not itself seem to be considered employment for purposes of fulfilling this act. Many such people had either an actual other job or a position just on paper to avoid the harsh penalties for vagrancy. Others may have sought connection a noble household, been a legitimate tradesman, or they could have found two judges to issue them a certificate of exemption from the act. While on a practical level if a Master had an established home and was settled and owned a school they would be more or less immune to being hassled over this law, it was still something to be concerned about.

Further complicating matters, Aylward points out that Patents of the kind that was issued by Henry VIII generally expired upon the death of the monarch, and there is no proof of renewal by Elizabeth. In fact, in 1545 the Alderman of London required them to produce a copy of such a Patent as part of a court case to settle an issue about setting up schools in the city of London, and no such copy was produced. On top of that, the Sloane Manuscript 2530 - the papers of the Masters of Defense that Herbert Berry transcribed in "The Noble Science" has example Master and Provost letters which include statements that Elizabeth did renew the privileges granted by Henry and also went so far as to grant them license to "play openly within the City of London." Yes, the Sloane Manuscript is the only place we have this written down - no other records we have back this up. Now, I'm not particularly conversant in what might have burned in the Great Fire. Maybe records relating to the London Masters of Defense were among them, I don't know. It's possible, but I'm inclined to doubt it. We have so many papers of Elizabeth's official patents and charters that I don't think that we'd somehow be missing something here.

And that wraps it up! I want to follow up further at some point with a more detailed look at what prize-fights entailed, and I'll likely do that in a few weeks. That's a separate rabbit hole in my mind though, because that's something that I really want to recreate at an event sometime. I still have dreams of a raised stage up at Bicolline for Les Beltaines some year - because doing that in that setting in front of the tavern would be a blast. It's for sure Not My Event but the setting would be wonderful.

And that wraps up this random little dive into inn-yards and raised stages and fencing on them and some fun background into the Masters of Defense and all that! Like I said, next time I'll probably write up a look at prize-fights and I'll also get back into Book Two of Fabris. (Remember that I was doing writeups of that? I do!)

Yet More Playhouses!

I'm just continuing down this here rabbit hole and I'm okay with this! I might come up for air but I'll probably just end up looping back to poke more at the London Masters of Defense and then prep for a class about them. So that's cool!

So, prize-fights and the venues.

Prior to 1570, there was a fair variety of places where prize-fights occurred. The most common was the open-air market of Leadenhall, but there were other outdoor settings as well. After 1570 however, prize-fights almost entirely shifted to inn-yard theaters and public playhouses. The two most commonly used inns were the Bull and the Bell Savage, with the Curtain and the Theater as the two most popular playhouses.

I mentioned in my last post that I pulled out some stage sizes for two playhouses in London - the Fortune and the Globe. Ironically, according to O.L. Brownstein in his article A Record of London Inn-Playhouses from c. 1565-1590, "there are contemporary references to fencing shows in all the public theaters except the Globe and the Fortune." Both of those were buildings that were built specifically as playhouses though, and never adapted from anything else. What about the other venue that we've seen discussed in reference to prize-fights: the inn-yard theatre?

An inn-yard theatre is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A raised stage would be temporarily built in the courtyard of an inn, and plays would be performed there. The audience would be charged for an entry, and a multi-story inn could also effectively have raised viewing galleries due to the rooms and balconies along the sides of the courtyard.

While the Sloane Ms. 2530 has a number of inns listed as prize-fight venues, in his study and transcription of the manuscript, "The Noble Science," Herbert Berry notes that the Ms. 2530 was neither the official register of the company nor a complete accounting of the company's activities. We know from other documents of the time, such as letters to the Aldermen of the City of London asking for permission to hold a prize-fight with all the attendant pomp, that other sites were used that were not noted in Ms. 2530. Although I have not yet found proof that any prizes were fought at the Boar's Head, it seems to me to be a good enough example of an inn-yard which was converted over time to a true play-house. That said, I did note that in "The Boar's Head Playhouse" (Folger Books, 1986) Berry speculates that the stage built in 1598 - 3'6" high, and it specifically had a railing to prevent the audience from trying to climb up - could have been placed in the middle of the yard with the hope of enticing prize-fights to happen there.

So let's talk about what the stage and the inn-yard looked like at various points in its development! (All of this data is from "The Boar's Head Playhouse," by the way.) In its original form, the full size of the open yard was 55'7" x 54'6", and the first free-standing stage in the middle of this was 25'x39'7". 

To this point, I recently grabbed a tape measure, some cones, and a Lupold, and we laid out a rectangle the size of that initial stage. Then we took up a pair of spears - being the most sizeable weapons we'd expect to use in any of rapier, C&T, or A&S projects - and proceeded to play around in the list we'd set up. I am here to tell you that it was luxurious. Even when we were testing it on all angles while moving around one another, we never really felt as though we were in imminent danger of stepping outside the boundaries of the stage being used. (Or what would have happened in period, falling off of the stage.) I imagine that if the fighters were fighting across the shortest dimension with larger weapons that they'd be very aware of the edge, but as long as your fight didn't consist solely of backpedaling, you'd probably be fine.

From there, when the stage was moved to be permanently up against one of the buildings bordering the inn-yard which had been converted to a tiring-house, they kept the same basic dimensions for it. Notably, despite expanding the galleries available for the audience, there is no evidence of the stage height increasing; presumably the owners wanted to be able to fill the floor of the yard to the brim and have it visible from anywhere. The only other meaningful change to the stage would have been that it was accessible directly from the tiring-house, without steps or ramps or clambering up a three and a half foot step.

There we are! A reasonable example of a free-standing temporarily erected stage in an inn-yard, which could well have been used in prize-fights!

I think there'll be one more post wrapping up the London Masters of Defense rabbit hole, and then I'll try to roll it all together into a single short class for the kicks of it.

More cool history stuff! Scaffolds and stages and prize fights!

So okay (for I begin in the traditional manner of my people) a couple days ago, I posted a bit about a small dive I took into how backing up was seen as bad, and how at one point Saviolo said that he thought Englishmen backed up too much in their fight and that this made Silver sad enough to post more than a hundred flyers around where Saviolo's school was to challenge him to a fight.

What came up in that was the idea that fighting on a raised scaffold, or stage, was a thing. Silver wanted to fight on one explicitly so that if someone backed up too much they'd fall off, but fighting on a raised stage without railings was pretty common in England. It was a standard thing for the prize fights fought for advancement among the Masters of Defense!

For context, there were four ranks in the guild. There was scholar, free scholar, provost, and master. (There were four Ancient Masters, but those were the folks in charge of the whole thing. You didn't just get promoted to that.) You joined as a scholar and had to stay there for seven years. Then you could play your prize for free scholar. Seven years after that, you could play your prize for provost. Another seven years and you could play your prize for Master. (That's how it was on paper. In reality there were a number of spectacular exceptions to those rules, sometimes to the point where people who had to adhere to the rules seemed to be the exception.)

So. Prize fights were big deals. For the rank of provost and master, the candidate had to invite all those of the rank he was fighting his prize for as lived within 60 miles (for provost) or 40 miles (for master) of London. If the provost or master had to travel for more than 20 miles, the candidate had to pay for half the travel costs as well. (There were penalties owed for any eligible provost or master not notified, as well as penalties for provosts and masters who did not attend a prize fight, barring certain exemptions.) The candidate also had to pay a fee upon promotion, in exchange for what was supposed to be a fancy set of letters patent with signatures and seals and all. (I haven't been able to track down any surviving examples of the letters themselves, but the Sloane Ms. 2530 does contain the text for example letters, which is pretty great.

Anyway! So there was going to be a monetary cost to the candidate, but they were usually able to end up making a good profit after their expenses because prize fights were a big deal. There are still written records of how there would be a giant procession from the edge of town to wherever the fights would be taking place. Drums, noise, the whole nine yards. If you made money by selling food along the route - or better, near where the fights were - you might be pretty happy about this. Other businesses not so much, and they weren't shy about making that known. There's a lot of background drama about whether or not permits for the procession or the fight would be granted, if they held them anyway, the whole lot of it. But the upshot was that prize fights were almost an impromptu local holiday, and they would draw a huge crowd which would typically show appreciation for fights by tossing money onto the scaffolding, which the candidates claimed as their own. Everyone profits, everyone wins! The London Masters really were a functioning (though at times very dysfunctional) trade guild.

Right, so that's all the context for why fighting up on a stage for these sorts of things happened. I wanted to get an idea about how large a space the prize fights would have to take place in, which is its own thing. A number of them took place on stages built in inn-yards; the Bell Savage comes up regularly in this context. I haven't nailed down the size for what might be built as a temporary structure in an inn-yard, but I did find some articles by Herbert Berry (the same person who wrote the study and transcription of the Sloane Ms. 2530!) which might shed some light on this! There's one on the Bell Savage, another on the Red Lion. I'm hoping that there's a reference to a stage size, or at least a reasonable set of guesses based on building foundations and the like, since it was mentioned that the Bell Savage had theirs set up against the side of the inn. As an aside, while the plans are from the 1800s, the London Picture Archive has this and this if you want a general layout idea of the Bell Savage, which is really cool. I'm hoping to get a chance to skim through "Inns and Taverns of old London" which at least promises to be interesting!

Playhouses though, are another matter! They were also used for prize fights, and even without needing to cannonball into JSTOR there's some decent starter information out there. The wiki page for English renaissance theater has a sketch from 1596 as well as a shot from the modern reproduction of the Globe which show a bit of the layout. Also, playshakespeare.org has an article about the Globe which says, "A rectangular stage platform, also known as an 'apron stage', thrust out into the middle of the open-air yard. The stage measured approximately 43 feet (13.1m) in width, 27 feet (8.2m) in depth and was raised about 5 feet (1.52m) off the ground." Britannica.com has articles on the other three well-known playhouses of a similar style, the Rose, the Fortune, and the Swan. The Rose was smaller, and the article doesn't note a stage size. The Fortune's stage was about 43 feet by 27.5 feet according to the contract with the builder. The article on the Swan has no information about the size of the playhouse or stage.

Even if it's raised and has no rails, 43 by 27 sounds like a list which is positively luxurious in size compared to what many of us are used to! 

I'm going to get back to doing that Fabris Book Two Part One retrospective, and I also want to do more with the Marozzo vs Fiore knife defenses as a treat, but I may try and collect a list of the playhouses where we have records of prizes being fought, and see if I can nail down specific stage sizes for those. That should be a fun spreadsheet to look forward to!

List boundaries and historic prize fights, or what happens when you mean to write one thing and find a related research rabbithole instead.

Now that we've gone through all the rules for the single rapier in book two, I wanted to kick some thoughts around them in general. I had intended this entry to be something along the lines of "what principles do they illustrate and have in common and what can we learn from them all and how are they useful to us in what we do."

I meant to do that. I really, really did.

But see, I started by kicking around the thought of "look, how useful is it for me to just do the implacable walk of death towards someone if they can back up into infinite space because we don't have static rapier list boundaries." Because we don't, right? One of the discussions about major tournaments that comes up regularly enough that I can set my watch by it is what to do if someone backs into the ropes. Responses usually vary between "call a hold to make sure nobody goes outside of them and continue, repeating as needed" and "call a hold and recenter them before continuing." Neither of these offer a particularly realistic take on how personal combat happened in period, where that level of retreating could be seen as cowardly.

That's where this all started.

Anyone who has taken a class with Tom Leoni has heard about how renaissance Italian dueling custom held that if a duelist backed up out of the circle or other bounds, they forfeited the match. The closest I've found to a clear citation in writing on this is in Saviolo's "Of Honor and Honorable Quarrels." (Jared Kirby edited and presented an edition under the title "A Gentleman's Guide to Duelling" which I think is still readily available.) In the section entitled "In How Many Cases A Man May Overcome In The Lists" Saviolo writes, "Last of all is the running out of the lists. Of this sort of losing the field everyone is so much the more shameful by how much the more I have placed and set him down in his lowest place or room. To be slain in the field is less shameful, though it is far more dangerous and hurtful."

Additionally, Silver (I know, I know) wrote about an incident involving Saviolo, his friend (possibly employee or co-teacher?) Jeronimo, and Silver himself in "Paradoxes of Defense." As Silver described it: "Then came Vincentio and Jeronimo, they taught Rapier-fight at the Court, at London, and in the countrey, by the space of seaven or eight yeares or thereabouts. These two Italian Fencers, especially Vincentio, said that Englishment were strong men, but had no cunning, and they would go backe too much in their fight, which was great disgrace unto them. Upon these words of disgrace against Englishmen, my brother Toby Silver and my selfe, made challenge against them both, to play with them at the single Rapier, Rapier and Dagger, the single Dagger, the single Sword, the Sword and Target, the Sword and Buckler, & two hand Sword, the Staffe, battel Axe, and Morris Pike, to be played at the Bell Savage upon the Scaffold, where he that went in his fight faster backe than he ought, of Englishmen or Italian, should be in danger to breake his necke off the Scaffold."

It was fairly common for the London Masters of Defense to conduct prize fights on raised stages (what Silver terms a scaffold), usually set up in the yard of an inn or playhouse so that an audience could gather and watch. Covering the neighborhood in flyers, which George and Toby Silver did as well, was also a pretty common thing to do based on this story as well as how prize fights would be announced as well. 

Anyway! All of this fun rabbithole diving is what causes me to keep thinking, "we should come up with a compromise there somehow" and I keep wondering how I'd go about building a list with sturdy railings so that when a fencer hits the edge of the lists no hold is called and everything just goes on. I don't know how practical it is to do that for the many lists that a major tournament has - the usual solution of list poles and rope is just a whole lot more space efficient for storage, as well as being adjustable when setting up. But maybe doing something for a single list for cool prize fights done in a period style or a display or something like that?

I'd love to be able to do something like that on a raised platform, and definitely that should have railings. A more immersive event would be awesome for this, or at least a thematically cool site for it. I guess what I'm saying is that I need to see about setting up a raised stage or at least a fenced in list for the town square at Beltaines and then posting flyers some weeks beforehand about a prize fight or something. See? Super period!

Then I went down the related dive of remembering that the London Masters were a business. (One article about them refers to them accurately as a "corporation.") This means that when you played your prize for promotion from scholar to free scholar, free scholar to provost or provost to master, you had to do things like notify members of the appropriate rank within a certain radius that the contest was happening so they could come and fight. If you failed to inform someone, you had to pay a penalty. If someone traveled more than twenty miles to get there, you paid half their traveling expenses. When you got your signed and sealed letter of rank, you had to pay duties and such for that as well. It's pretty bonkers.

Point is though, raised stage with railings for cool period prize fights in a really cool town setting.

This is what happens when I start to look into something and then just keep going and going. Next time we'll talk about things like technique and underlying principles and such. This time it was cool history stuff and that's just fine.

What We've Been Up To

So in the last couple months, what have I been up to?

I've been doing PT for my arm. It's not fun, but it's getting better. Fencing isn't the Way It Used To Be, but it's a ton closer to it than it was just before the surgery, so I really can't be too unhappy. Of course, I feel like I've backslid a lot, so I'm trying to shore things up. Gotta do more drills, focus on body mechanics and positioning, and then move into blade mechanics and moving smoothly from the balls of my feet.

Similar to before the surgery, I'm getting a lot more cloak work in then I ever did before, which is pretty grand. I don't feel like I can rely on it yet, but getting to work through plays with it and compare it to similar dagger plays from Fabris is proving really interesting.

Let's see. The East has a grappling experiment now! It's slow to take off - this time of year means we're all inside, and most floors are less forgiving to fall on than grass, and mats can be hard to come by. There'll be a small class/show and tell thing at Birka though, and Anastasia and I are planning to do a practice tour if we can to get more people up and running. I've really been enjoying the compare and contrast of different plays that this can open up though, as well as letting me get to really work with Fiore's knife defenses in a more freeform environment. Good stuff, and it shows me where some pretty giant holes are in my understanding - both practical and research - which is always nice to be updated on.

Speaking of research, I just wasn't able to pull together my paper for A&S Champs. The winter's been pretty bad for me, and sleep has been a terrible lie. I'm a little down about it, but I'll help out at the competition in other ways, and pull it together for later. It isn't like I'm going to stop researching and learning and teaching, anyway.

Oh also, VISS! It's a VISS year, and this year I'll be mainlining a Fabris-based intensive, which means I'll be mentally rolling around in a lot of material to really internalize, as well as things I can actually use as I'm assembling a Book Two work. So that's awesome! I always look forward to VISS, and I'm hoping that this year it'll really knock this funk off me but good.

Right, it's time for drills.

April Update Time

Nothing super new since the last update, but let's not let this blog just lie around completely dead, right?

Practice continues apace! So does conditioning work, when my schedule, son, and health allow. So that's good. I'm trying to be better about being kind to myself when my meat-car isn't allowing me to do what I want at a practice or at the gym, and buckling down and doing what I can.

The regional practice we had in Carolingia was a blast, fencing at Mudthaw was great (the C&T tourney was fantastic!), and seeing a couple old faces show up at local practices has also been fun. Need more of that.

I should really get around to editing the draft post I've got sitting around on competition, mastery, headspace, and journey over destination. That'll take a lot of focus to make sure that I get it right, but I'm hoping that next week I can finally get that up. (Warning: it'll probably still be super rambling and messy, but whatever.)

I'm definitely teaching a class on Fabris' forte guards at EK 50 Year, which should be fun. It'll by necessity touch on Book Two, but not go into any great detail there. There's also going to be a By the Book Tournament that I have some very high hopes for. I'm really looking forward to all of that, along with what will no doubt be a bunch of ad-hoc teaching around the field. Good times!

(I'm also thinking of doing a class sometime based on the period methods "to fence a bestial man" which should be a hoot.)

Balfar's is in a couple weeks, and I'm planning on marshaling the melees, and doing So. Many. Pickups. All the pickups forever.

And that's all the news that's fit to report right now!

Still going!

Yup, this blog is for reals still going! It's just that life has been busy and when sleep is that hard, so are blog updates.

Here we are, though! Let's get caught up.

In my world of rubber meets the road fencing, I won this year's King's and Queen's Rapier Championship. The tournament was fantastically well run, and was full of good fencing, good people, and was as problem-free a tournament as I've ever seen. People were excellent to each other, fought their best, and kept it clean. I was so excited to get to fight my buddy Devillin (who was chosen as Queen's Champion, which is great!) in the finals, and thrilled to get to fight the fights that we had. (Plus, people got video, so I've been able to re-watch them ad-nauseum and critique my Fabris form. This isn't a good idea for long term mental health. Obsess over videos of your fights in moderation!)

In the world of I Do Research Papers About Martial Arts, I entered my paper on applying Fabris' system to the buckler in St. Elegius back in November, incorporated feedback from that, and entered it into King's and Queen's A&S Champions this past weekend. While I didn't make it to the final round, I am so stoked that Doroga - whose blog is over here and you should check it out - was selected as the Queen's A&S Champion for his paper on Destreza. Big congratulations to him for that!

I got some very good feedback from from the judges about my paper (and I was very happy that while the rubric forms were handed out to all the entrants, feedback was delivered verbally and allowed for good discussions over it); primarily structural issues with it, which are definitely good to hear about from a fresh set of eyes. It was interesting to hear that the judges would have liked to see some secondary sources, as opposed to just the primary ones that I had - we had a good laugh over how it's almost always the other way around. I think a paper with a broader topic would have been more interesting for the judges, but I had made the active decision to walk into a narrow but deep topic instead and focus on Fabris. It hamstrung me somewhat on being able to write to the rubric, so that is what it is. While I would have liked to have done better in the competition, folks were very enthusiastic about my research and it went over very well - so I'm pleased with all that. Also, I'm just ridiculously excited for my friend Doroga and he deserves every bit of praise for his selection as champion! And the first martial A&S champion in the East, no less! This is going to be a great year.

Also, while it wasn't martial work, I want to take the moment to congratulate Elena Hylton for winning King's A&S Champion! Her webpage is here and there's buckets of amazing stuff up there.

I'm planning on hitting Aedult Swim this coming weekend, and while I'm not teaching any formal classes, I'm absolutely always going to be up for working on Fabris or other Italian rapier plays and such with folks, troubleshooting problems, and otherwise swordnerding out.

...maybe I'll look into a formal block of time for doing that at Mudthaw next month? I'll have to see what the schedule for the day looks like.

That's about that! I'll hopefully be able to get back to more regular updates now that the sun is coming back. I've got some headspace thoughts percolating, which could turn into a post any day now.

Yup, this thing is totally still on!

It's been a bit of a break. Not as long as some that have happened here, so there's that!

Mostly, I've just been caught up in (good!) Real Life Stuff, and also feeling super drained by other (bad!) Real Life Stuff. But anyhow, let's move on. This is just going to be a short update with what I've been up to, and also just getting myself back into the habit of regular updates here.

Most of my writing time has been going into a paper for A&S Champions next month. Rather than writing about rapier, I'm focusing on some combat that we really can't safely do competitively in the SCA - sickles. I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with the paper, but submission deadlines wait for no one, and I can always make revisions later on after the competition. Despite this, I'm really excited that in addition to all the other awesome stuff happening that day, that I can stand around and talk to people about what Mair felt the proper method was for us to kill each other with farming equipment!

Next month I'm lucky enough to be going out to VISS again; I'm looking forward to some fantastic classes, and being able to bring a bunch of new knowledge back to people to share.

Practice is still going strong! I both enjoy and am frustrated by the continuing practice to work on good period technique on its own, and then begin to integrate it combatively. Fortunately, "good period technique" is also just "good technique" so it all works out well. Lately, I've been having trouble with acting in the right tempo; too much thinking about what to do and paying attention to doing it exactly right as opposed to just doing it and letting it get more right over time. Fortunately, drilling this is a super helpful thing!

Speaking of, I've been doing more solo practice lately and I've got some thoughts kicking around on solo drilling, what it's good for, what it's bad for, and useful directions to take it in. I think that'll be my next entry, which should be up very soon.

That's that!

Poor Scholarship or No Scholarship?

I know, I promised Fabris next. And I'm drafting that entry now, but a couple discussions came out of some thoughts I had earlier, and I figured they were worth putting up here.

Out there on the internet, someone had posted a link to John Clements' book on rapier combat, saying that it's a super great resource. These days though, it's really kind of worse than no resources at all in a lot of ways.

This led me to start to wonder - what's worse, poor scholarship or no scholarship?

When Clements published this book in 1997 (if I'm not wrong), there was a huge lack of commonly available resources for rapier combat. Wilson's The Art of Defence came out in 2002, I believe. Windsor's The Duelist's Companion was out in 2006. (I'm pretty sure of those dates, after some digging. If I'm wrong, please correct me.)

Today, there are any number of excellent resources available for rapier combat. Even discounting online communities, blogs, and self-published ebooks to focus on traditionally published works, we have Wilson's book in a second edition, Windsor's take on Capo Ferro, Leoni's translations, and more. Venturing online, there are a huge number of quality blogs, Dante's self-published ebook, and the Acadamie Duello website and DVD. There are so many high-quality scans of the original manuals, and various translations of them. The Wiktenaur site is amazing. We're really spoiled for choice in many ways.

So because of the time it came out, Clements' book was really the only game in town, and I'd venture to say that the sweeping majority of people sure didn't know how to really judge the contents. That's fine, though - we know better now, and have more and more available resources to us.

The thing is, I think that just because it's been around for so long, some of the early bad scholarship has entered our long-term DNA. Clements' book keeps getting brought up on occasion. Weird little snippets of bad technique keeps reappearing. I'm certainly guilty of this - very early misinterpretations of concepts appeared, were taught, and while they've since been corrected, it seems like the corrections are playing catch-up to the spread of the original poor technique.

How do we excise the existence of what we know to be bad resources or bad technique? Is it even possible, with books and papers just being out there? A friend compared it to Kudzu - it just spreads, and when someone rolls in from the outside to try and correct what a group has been taught and keeps teaching, there's a risk of being seen as That Terrible Reenactor/Scholar/Whatever.

On the other hand, some of that early bad scholarship led to good scholarship and led to what we have today. It got people interested, and learning. It helped bring about what we have now.

Even today, newer people can have ideas based on poor understanding of the work, but the community is generally such that it's caught, taught correctly and in a generally helpful and encouraging way, and we all move on better for the experience.

How do we give due credit to the scholarship of the past, which helped us form the community we have today, while acknowledging that the scholarship was poor, and not letting the erroneous conclusions of it become ingrained any further?

Tricks

In keeping with the trend lately of examining (or re-examining) fundamental concepts, I wanted to kick around some thoughts on tricks. Most of these are opinions I've held for a long time, but they've been put into a new context recently, so now I get to put these thoughts out here.

Usually when someone is describing a trick that they have, they're talking about one specific set of motions that they do that usually ends up with them striking their opponent. It's usually a set of motions that has a reasonably high success rate, or at least that the fighter perceives as a high success rate. It's a set of motions that they can train repeatedly, and can become very fast and smooth; they're basically setting up a macro that they can execute at whim.

If someone is describing a trick that someone else has, the definition is usually similar - a specific set of motions, a thing that they do, that works most of the time.

I think that both of these are problematic areas of thought to fall into. It's not the training that's the problem - most every fighter that I know has a number of go-to attacks or setups that they use, and a lot of those have turned into signature actions. This person's stutter step, that person's blade displacement on a lunge, that other person's wrist-roll on a cut. Those are all totally reasonable. The problem that I see coming up a lot lately is when the concept of the trick exists in a vacuum, and isn't based on sound fundamentals.

To put it another way, it's not the concept of a trick that I think is an issue, but it's the thought process behind it. If you don't understand what you're doing and why it works - if you can't describe how your trick is playing with measure, or deceiving the opponent, or whatever - then it's not adaptable. You're stuck with this one thing that you can do super well, sure, but it's not really adaptive if the situation changes. I think that the fighters I know who have a few bread and butter shots (and man, now I need a better term than "trick") but who really grasp the core concepts of fighting are insanely dangerous, because they can change up those shots on the fly.

Now that I've written this down, I'm not sure where else to take this (other than to say, "Hey! Learn your fundamentals and also be sure to drink your Ovaltine!") but I'll probably mull this over in my head more.

Wiktenaur Donation Drive

It's time for me to do this quick driveby fundraising mention here for Period Combat Nerds! 

The good folks over at the Wiktenaur site are holding an Indiegogo fundraising campaign, to pay for ongoing site costs as well as access to more manuals to scan and post for all of us to use.

This site is a fantastic resource, and being able to see them post even more manuals would be really awesome.

The drive ends on February 17. They've already met the base goal and are well into stretch goals, but every little bit, right?

Work limits writing, so here's an old study that's probably interesting!

Since my last post, I've started working again (yay!) which has cut into my ability to keep cranking on things here. New job, new schedules, things get shifted. I'll try to get something new up by the end of the weekend, though.

In lieu of more Fabris, I'll leave you with this New York Times blog post from 2009, involving some studies about taking ibuprofin before exercise. I know a number of us who've done that - before melees, before tournaments. Turns out, it's a terrible idea. Who knew?

A few Pennsic thoughts.

Before I dive back into the Fabris (WITH SHOUTING, FOR IAN) I figured I'd drop a few notes on Pennsic here - or at least specifically fighting notes. In no particular order, even!

The melees were, well, melees. That said though, they were really, really smooth and had not nearly the number of issues that I'm used to. I blame the weather being so awesome and not hot and gross. The fact that it wasn't 95* with humidity to match really seemed to take the tempers off.

There was a meaningful force imbalance in play, though I admit that I'm not sure of the numbers. It was especially noticeable in the woods though, where the East was able to have a pretty much unbroken line across the entire woods and the Middle, well, couldn't. Partway through, the East was told by either HRM or HRH (I got differing reports on that) to stop using DFBsThe bridge battle (Gunning: The War Point) was wacky fun, but pretty unsatisfying as a war point. Again, I didn't notice any really upset fighters though, so I imagine we all had the same attitude going into it.

Another thing that I noticed for something like the second or third year running was the Freelance Academy Press sponsored track of WMA classes. This is excellent, and I want more of this. I realize this means that I need to put up or shut up, and despite my fear of a class full of people who will point and tell me how wrong I am, that I should do this damn thing, huh?

A few things did make me blink over the course of Pennsic, though.

Meat Shields - I come from a kingdom where disabled fencers are obliged to remove themselves from the field, so we tend to just not see them where I'm from. I get that it's not forbidden by Pennsic convention (and likely in other kingdoms as well), but man, I just think it's silly. That said, I saw (and at one point was involved in) what would have been a double kill situation in a tournament with one person dead and the other having lost both arms, but the latter being allowed to continue because hey, they aren't dead. (Which, for the record, I was totally okay with every time I saw it.) So maybe I'm just a hypocrite, or it's a melee thing that irks me because melee.

Spears - Oh, boy. So. A number of folks from a number of kingdoms brought a number of examples of experimental spear designs to show people, play around with, and get feedback on. Universally, I think, the reactions were, "Well, it's neat, but hell if I want to get hit with that." Personally, I have Strong Feelings about them, on both sides. In almost nothing resembling order:

• Rapier is, at heart, a civilian weapon. Our melees are at best random terrible militia and more likely Montague v. Capulet brawls. Why the hell would we have pikes?
• Without putting any force behind a shot I was able to hit Caine hard enough to make him, as he put it, "Throw up in his mouth a little." Granted, I put the point in the right place while he wasn't braced for it, but how often would that happen in a melee? Lots. And that was with no force behind the shot - I can't imagine what that would have done with the force that I'd end up throwing in a melee.
• Any head shot with a spear transferred all the force right to the neck. There's no extra mass in what we wear on our heads to soak up the force.
• The arms race. We're already seeing it to a small degree with twohanders, and a very large degree with shields. (As an aside, I would kill for a maximum shield size of 24". Pretty sure that's the biggest thing I've found in any manual or the like that was used with rapiers or rapierlike weapons. Am I wrong? I'm probably wrong.) I feel that if pikes showed up, then it would very rapidly become All Pikes and All Giant Shields All The Time and then we're basically fighting rattan without armor. I just don't want that in rapier.
• On the other hand, spears were taught in a number of period manuals, and also used in the London Masters of Defense prize fights. It would be pretty awesome if we could see a longsword v. spear match, assuming it could be done safely.

I'm not sure where that leaves me. I think that I might be okay with spears as a C&T only option (which also defaults to no melee), assuming a good and safe design could be created - and that's already a pretty high bar to set. They just have more mass, and thanks to F=MA, that means they'll just hit harder no matter what.

DFB - I'm still a little divided here. It's a tool, and I use it really well. It's realistic, in that if I can get behind someone on a melee field for long enough to plant my feet, they're guaranteed out of the fight. But it's not what I want to play. I want more people facing me when I kill them, and I want more of That Kind Of Honorable Engagement. Then again, I'm also the person who wants to give more people singles when they ask for them despite also rolling over people in melees in which we're supposed to be training for Pennsic. I should really just examine what I want out of my own game and make up my mind, huh? I suspect the answer will make me less popular in the East, and more Donovan "Funkiller" Shinnock, but whatev. I'll go read The Phoenix Guard again and remind myself of one of the big reasons I got into this whole organization, right? Right.

So that was my Pennsic. I fought a whole lot of people, saw some great people get recognized for being great, avoided the EMT cart, and had fun doing what I do. Which is pretty great.